These guys are good!
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| chappaquachap May 28, 2005 5:14 PM EDT |
McVoy is quoted as saying "The open source guys can scrape together enough resources to reverse engineer stuff. That's easy. It's way cheaper to reverse engineer something than to create something new. But if the world goes to 100% open source, innovation goes to zero. The open source guys hate it when I say this, but it's true." Oddly enough his actions have spurred a definitely non-zero level of innovation... Much has been written about the Linux/Bitkeeper controversy. The most interesting thing I've yet seen is is about GIT, the open-source solution replacement for BitKeeper being put together by Torvalds and friends; in particular, http://kerneltraffic.org/git/gt20050502_1.html, a summary of the first two weeks of traffic on the GIT mailing list. I printed out a copy (80 pages or so) and read much of it. Now I've been coding for several decades and have even co-authored a paper in this area (SCM). I knew the Linux folks were good, but I had no idea they were this good. The amount of innovation, the pace of development, is just breathtaking. Absolutely overwhelming. So to those who wonder about the fate of Linux and open-source I say don't worry. You don't need to "get the facts"; you just to read some kernel traffic e-mail archives from time to time. |
| chappaquachap May 28, 2005 5:16 PM EDT |
The Git Traffic entry can be found at http://kerneltraffic.org/git/gt20050502_1.html, and also by google on 'git traffic'. |
| PaulFerris May 29, 2005 3:11 AM EDT |
chappaquachap: There are facts and there is crap like this story. Let's look at this from a totally different perspective. Regardless of the want of Linux on the desktop, which is how most people view the operating system, it's really mostly made strides as an infrastructure heavyweight -- looking at it from a GUI perspective, a lot of people draw stupid conclusions like McVoy. Unfortunately, this two-dimensional view of the product ignores the rather stark innovations that rest just below the surface, for those people that attempt complex infrastructure demanding, enterprise-class operations. There are hundreds of things about Linux and Free Software that make it innovative -- but they take hours to understand and not the cursory few seconds that I suspect McVoy and others have spent looking at the product -- and so these conclusions are drawn. Take Linux's file system -- compare it to Unix. Compare Samba to SMB implementations in Windows. Take any one of the dozens of languages that dot the Linux landscape. Look at the modules available for apache. If Linux is so gosh-darn non-innovative -- why is Microsoft attempting to create a shell (a real shell) for Windows now? One of the funniest things for me to have watched over the years is the look of stark shock on the face of some of the adept Linux admins I've had the pleasure to work with -- when they're confronted with just about any Unix for the first time. Those of us that worked our way from Unix to Linux don't have this problem -- the problem of missing command-line switches. The lack of color, the extra features built into commands -- the way bash changes the text at the top of a terminal window. Oh yeah, Linux has a lot of Unix lineage -- but it aint Unix, and you can easily get a second from any heavy-duty Linux guy that's gone the direction above. Lack of innovation my 4SS. |
| TxtEdMacs May 29, 2005 7:02 AM EDT |
Paul - I only had a couple years plus of real Unix experience and I tended to pick it up on the fly. I was not encouraged to take that route though I later got many requests to perform some version control tasks that this individual found impossible with ClearCase on the Windows side. Though we supposedly had cloned desktops, many of us had inexplicable problems. Now to my point: I really did not like coming home and working on my Linux box, because I had to teach myself to use the vi commands to examine my command line history and modify those commands for my next step. No arrow keys allowed. In regard to emacs, in some cases the Unix version actually worked better for me than what I found on Linux, e.g. highlighting a region under Unix and xemacs a backspace killed the entire region whereas under Linux I killed only the "hit", single character. [Though my editor of choice was emacs, I got help where I could and only later learned that I was given the vi codes to scan history and change it on they fly. Later being told I could use emacs commands had no effect - I stayed with the Korn shell, xemacs and vi codes! All were new to me.] No doubt about it - they are different animals with many seeming family resemblences. |
| dinotrac May 29, 2005 12:48 PM EDT |
Do I hear the sound of knees jerking? Did you actually read the article? McVoy was speaking in the context of companies, not individuals, and his statements are not unsupportable. In fact, you could make a case that the success of Linux supports his position. Consider: Companies act through their employees, and employees cost money. Everything a company does costs money. Everything. R&D costs a ton of money, and the results are not guaranteed. Look how much money spends on R&D that has produced, to date, Bob and Clippy. Now, look at some of the projects that have gotten the most corporate support: Linux, Apache, OpenOffice, Mozilla. For the sake of this argument, you could include something like Gutenprint, the recently renamed Gimp-print project. All of these projects have seen benefits from companies trying to offload R&D efforts. Instead of blowing huge wads for R&D that might not produce a proportionate competitive advantage, companies contribute far less money into open source projects and influence the feature sets and usability of those projects. IBM gets additional OS support for its mainframes and a solid http server base for WebSphere without having to develop from scratch. Printer makers can get good drivers for their products without doing much more than providing specs and or printers. It ain't innovation -- and that's the point. Lots and lots of software work isn't about innovation. It's about making and maintaining stuff that simply works and stays out of your way. By definition, that software is also the type that corporations will want to conribute to because it doesn't bring much glory but can cost a lot of money. By the way, real innovation doesn't tend to come out of big companies, either. Want an innovative web browser? Neither IE nor mozilla fit that bill, but Opera does. You could argue that Firefox, with it's extension architecture, also qualifies, but that's not a counter argument. Firefox didn't start out as a Mozilla project, but as the brainchild of a young programmer. One thing cannot reasonably be argued against: Whether most Open-Source projects contribute any real innovations or not, Open Source software as a whole is a definite innovation engine because it can provide tremendous functionality for very low costs, and that is good news for anyone who must operate on a shoe-string. |
| phsolide May 30, 2005 8:14 PM EDT |
McVoy is an odd duck. I don't know him personally, but I spent a half an hour in a car with a friend of mine, listening to my friend sweet-talk McVoy on the cell phone a few years ago. Apparently quite an ego, or something. Needed a lot of massaging. McVoy was onto open source really early: http://www.redhat.com/support/wpapers/community/freeunix/fre... His "Sourceware Operating System" paper should be required reading for all high-tech company director-level and above managers. He wrote it in 1993. And wasn't taken seriously. Ha ha! |
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